The present study investigates effects of conventionally metered and rhymed poetry on eye-movements in silent reading. Readers saw MRRL poems (i.e., metrically regular, rhymed language) in two layouts. In poem layout, verse endings coincided with line breaks. In prose layout verse endings could be mid-line. We also added metrical and rhyme anomalies. We hypothesized that silently reading MRRL results in building up auditive expectations that are based on a rhythmic “audible gestalt” and propose that rhythmicity is generated through subvocalization. Our results revealed that readers were sensitive to rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies but showed differential effects in poem and prose layouts. Metrical anomalies in particular resulted in robust reading disruptions across a variety of eye-movement measures in the poem layout and caused re-reading of the local context. Rhyme anomalies elicited stronger effects in prose layout and resulted in systematic re-reading of pre-rhymes. The presence or absence of rhythmic-gestalt-anomalies, as well as the layout manipulation, also affected reading in general. Effects of syllable number indicated a high degree of subvocalization. The overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL. This study introduces a two-stage approach to the analysis of long MRRL stimuli and contributes to the discussion of how the processing of rhythm in music and speech may overlap.

In reading conventional poems aloud, the rhythmic experience is coupled with the projection of meter, enabling the prediction of subsequent input. However, it is unclear how top-down and bottom-up processes interact. If the rhythmicity in reading loud is governed by the top-down prediction of metric patterns of weak and strong stress, these should be projected also onto a randomly included, lexically meaningless syllable. If bottom-up information such as the phonetic quality of consecutive syllables plays a functional role in establishing a structured rhythm, the occurrence of the lexically meaningless syllable should affect reading and the number of these syllables in a metrical line should modulate this effect. To investigate this, we manipulated poems by replacing regular syllables at random positions with the syllable “tack”. Participants were instructed to read the poems aloud and their voice was recorded during the reading. At the syllable level, we calculated the syllable onset interval (SOI) as a measure of articulation duration, as well as the mean syllable intensity. Both measures were supposed to operationalize how strongly a syllable was stressed. Results show that the average articulation duration of metrically strong regular syllables was longer than for weak syllables. This effect disappeared for “tacks”. Syllable intensities, on the other hand, captured metrical stress of “tacks” as well, but only for musically active participants. Additionally, we calculated the normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) for each line as an indicator for rhythmic contrast, i.e., the alternation between long and short, as well as louder and quieter syllables, to estimate the influence of “tacks” on reading rhythm. For SOI the nPVI revealed a clear negative effect: When “tacks” occurred, lines appeared to be read less altering, and this effect was proportional to the number of tacks per line. For intensity, however, the nPVI did not capture significant effects. Results suggests that top-down prediction does not always suffice to maintain a rhythmic gestalt across a series of syllables that carry little bottom-up prosodic information. Instead, the constant integration of sufficiently varying bottom-up information appears necessary to maintain a stable metrical pattern prediction.